Any Minute (22 page)

Then Sarah saw them. None of the other kids paid much mind to the couple necking beneath the tree. Intent on a kiss, the young woman braced her hand at the small of her back against the tree trunk, even while the young man angled her spine against the rough bark. They were only silhouettes, these two who had slunk beyond the far shadows so no one would see. His head lowered, her gaze lifted, and who knew if the whispers came from the rustling leaves or the promises he made as he told her he would always love her. Who knew?

A flash of white collar and the thin bow at her neck where she’d folded and refolded it to look perfect with his letter sweater. A glimmer of leather where her finger hooked his belt loop, something to hang on to.

The radio played in the distance. The song changed, and somebody whistled along to the words of Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.” Sarah stood with her fists clenched, indignant, wondering what God intended to do, watching her mother let herself be coaxed out of sight over the ridge, Jane’s wrist clasped in his hand. She didn’t try to wrest it away, her black-and-white saddle shoes taking unsteady tiptoe steps in the grass.

Even in her anger, Sarah stumbled forward, trying to follow them. “Mama,” she shouted. “Don’t!” But Jane didn’t hear. Sarah gripped her grandmother’s arm. “Annie, you’ve got to make her stop it. We don’t have to let her do this.”

“Oh yes. We do. We do have to let her do this. She made the choice long ago.”

“Annie,
please
.” Because this cut through her bitterness, it was all she could figure out. “Don’t you think that’s why God sent us here? To change things for her?”

“God didn’t send you here to change things, child. He sent you here so you’d ask him to help change things that you can’t. The things that happened can’t be changed, but you can change, and so could Jane if she wanted to.”

Tears welled in Sarah’s eyes.

“One mistake does not have to rule a person’s entire life. Jane is stuck in a moment of time, and she has let it ruin her life, but you don’t have to make the same mistake.”

“Please.” She spun around, gripped the cuffs of Annie’s short sleeves. “
Please
.”

“Think about it.” Her grandmother brushed hair from her eyes, then gravely rubbed one of Sarah’s dark ringlets between her fingers, twisting it like an old telephone cord. “Child, God always works good things out of our mistakes if we let him. If your mother wouldn’t have gotten pregnant, then
you
wouldn’t be here.”

Sarah balled her hands into angry fists. “What difference would that make, Annie? Wouldn’t Mama have been better off? She hinted all the time at how different her life would have been if I’d never been born.”

And Annie said, “Your mother didn’t have to spend her life mad, but she chose to do it. She made a wrong choice in a moment of passion, and she spent her life blaming others for the results.”

Hearing it in her grandmother’s words, Sarah finally began to understand it wasn’t her fault.

“Even now she is still trying to get someone to pay her back for the bad things that happened in her life, but only God can do that.”

Jane Cattalo wasn’t the most popular girl in school or even much of a looker in her adolescent and teenage years. She was just a nondescript bobby-soxer who played the French horn in the high-school band, without a glittering personality, everyone agreed, and with a nose a little too wide for the rest of her face. “She might have been sort of cute,” one of the parents noted from the third row in the meeting hall that night, “if she ever stopped being so sour.”

Still, thanks to her persistence and being a senior, she was elected drum majorette that year. Everyone knew she’d been working on a miniskirt and matching hooded cape—a Butterick pattern, double-breasted with those big brass-plated buttons and yards of facing—for her 4-H clothing-construction project. This was the arena where she would earn her distinction; everybody knew it. The detailing on the cape alone would earn grand-prize rosettes at the fair.

Everyone knew Ronny Lee Perkins had given Jane his letter jacket for a while that summer. And after a couple of months, after football season had started, he’d taken it back, which surprised no one. First, everyone knew Ronny Lee had to go to college so he wouldn’t get drafted. Second, for a boy like Ronny Lee Perkins, something more interesting would always be coming along.

Jane’s Latin teacher, Mr. Gregg, was first to call everyone’s attention to the problem. During the “public discussion” portion of the School District 11 Board of Education meeting (so full that Sarah and Annie found it difficult to peer through the crowd when Wingtip led them in; even angels can end up in the rear when it’s standing room only), the teacher rose from his chair, walked toward the microphone when called upon, and asked, “Mr. Chairman. I wonder if we could discuss the situation I mentioned to Principal Steed in his office last week?”

Around the table, the board members frowned. They didn’t know the situation to which he referred. The chairman of the board asked, “You spoke with Dr. Steed about a matter? Can you tell us what this is?”

When Mr. Gregg announced the young lady’s name, it rang out like it had been broadcast over a bullhorn. “Jane Cattalo, sir.”

At the mention of Jane’s name, a woman in the fourth row sat a little straighter. Sarah felt Annie tense up next to her.

“Is that you?” Sarah asked. “Were you present at this meeting?”

“Yes,” her grandmother answered. “I’m sorry to say I was. That’s me sitting right there.”

They were still talking in the boardroom. The chairman asked, “And you’ve already spoken to Dr. Steed about it?”, bringing them back to the matter at hand.

“Graham Steed seems to want to ignore the situation.”

“I do not!” The high-school principal leaped from his seat as if a lightning bolt had struck him. “It is a sensitive issue, Gregg, and you know it. We should have discussed this privately, but now you have
trounced
on my authority by introducing it in front of the entire town.”

The board chairman jutted a chin toward the Latin teacher. “And how do you know that much about Miss Cattalo?”

“She’s in my fourth-period class, sir.”

Jane Cattalo was one of those stay-at-home girls who you didn’t think about much. She’d gotten brave enough to try out for the senior play,
South Pacific
, and although she wasn’t the type to play Nellie, her reasonable singing voice had gotten her a part in the chorus. She certainly wouldn’t be one to sample illicit drugs or to be drawn in by The Beatles or to say something objectionable about the boys in Vietnam. Which is why you could have heard a gnat come in for a landing right before the teacher remarked, “She has flaunted it in front of us, sir, and until now, we haven’t noticed.”

“Excuse me, but where is this girl? What is she flaunting?”

At the back of the room, Annie touched her granddaughter’s arm.

“It’s me, isn’t it?” Sarah whispered. “She’s trying to hide that I’m on the way.”

Annie hugged Sarah. “I’m afraid so.”

The horrible man hemmed and hawed, apparently trying to figure out how to state such delicate facts in mixed company. “Jane Cattalo’s barely seventeen years of age and…”

A few people just stared at him.

“She’s, well you know, she’s… I don’t know how to say it in front of the women, sir.”

But the women were starting to get the idea. The room erupted in gasps of disbelief and indignant humphs and murmured conversations.

“Well, perhaps you shouldn’t have brought it up at
all
.”

The woman in the fourth row, Annie when she was the mother of a high-school-aged daughter, rose from her chair. “Whatever you have to say about my daughter, you had better stop hinting at rumors and innuendos. If you have something to say, come right out and say it!”

“All right, I will. Are you her mother? You ought to take blame for this too.” At last the man found the words he’d been searching for. “How could you even show your face in town with a daughter who’s in the family way?”

A great deal of time passed before the hoopla died down and either the school-board chairman or the superintendent of schools could get a word in edgewise. Everyone in the hall seemed to have an opinion needing to be expressed. Finally, when he could be heard, the superintendent tried to take charge of his own meeting.

Mr. Graham Steed, who had not even discussed this subject with his wife, who had not even decided how he would present the idea in front of a small group of male colleagues, let alone a roomful of people, felt the tips of his ears go pink as a turnip.

What regrettable luck that any of them should find themselves in this position, having to report this delicate matter.

But no reliable public educator could let a girl in Jane’s condition go unnoticed. How might something like this affect the well-being of other young ladies in the classroom? After all, a thing like this was almost unheard of and quite shocking.

And the entire time Mr. Gregg was talking about the young woman and the situation at hand, Sarah Harper, formerly Sarah Cattalo, stood with her fingers resting lightly on the stackable chair in front of her, her stomach twisting in anguish, all the resentment she felt toward Jane coupling with the helpless realization that she hadn’t been the only person censuring her mother. Sarah felt sympathy for her mother for the first time as she realized how embarrassing this must have been for her.

The whole lot of them criticized Jane as if no one else in the meeting hall had ever gone astray or done anything wrong. How easy it can be to forget your own mistakes when you’re busy pointing a finger at someone else. Sarah stood by, powerless, as she watched her mother accused, tried, found guilty, and rejected before the entire town.

“How do I know this information for sure, Mr. Gregg?” the chairman asked.

The instructor gave a righteous chuckle. “If you take a close look, it is becoming quite evident and more so as each day goes by.”

Mr. Gregg’s voice grew shrill as he recounted the story. The girl had risen from her seat, he said, and he couldn’t help but wonder at her bulging silhouette as she’d worked the pencil sharpener. Just as he’d managed to convince himself this was no business of his—he must be imagining things, she’d dropped her pencil. As she stooped to retrieve it, her blouse hiked above the waist-band of her skirt. Before she could tug it down again, Mr. Gregg had seen the safety pin holding her skirt closed. The skirt had a button—he’d noted that too—so it wasn’t a case of laziness with needle and thread. The garment couldn’t stretch much farther. Its seams were ready to pop. The waistband alone was a good inch-and-a-half, two inches too small. Jane Cattalo was pregnant as all get out, and doing a masterful job of hiding it. And only three months before graduation to boot!

At the back of the room, Sarah gripped Annie’s hand. Sarah whispered, “Did you know the truth about Mama before this announcement?”

“I’d been wondering,” Annie said. “You know how it is when you have children. A mother sometimes just senses things. I think I suspected, but I didn’t want to admit it to myself.”

“I can’t believe they just… attacked her this way, Annie.”

“I was as shocked as everyone else to have it brought to light in such a public way.”

“It must have been awful. For both of you.”

“I didn’t want to think she would hide something so important from me.”

Sarah asked, “Even then, she was cutting people out of her life, wasn’t she?”

“I did everything to let her know that I’d be there to help, that even though she’d made a mistake, it didn’t change the way I felt about her,” Annie admitted. “But Jane’s disappointment, shame, and bitterness prevented her from being comforted in any way.”

“Oh, Annie.”

In the boardroom, the tension had grown thick. “Well, I believe we have some decisions to make, then, don’t we?” asked the chairman. Board members leaned across each other’s elbows and exchanged opinions. One by one they came up nodding, and the consensus was taken.

If Sarah had heard the story once from her mother, she’d heard it dozens of times. Stripped of her title as drum majorette. No longer allowed to enter the 4-H competition with her handiwork. No longer able to stand onstage and sing in
South Pacific
because “What sort of message would
that
convey?” No matter how hard she’d tried, Jane couldn’t hide a baby coming. When her belly began to swell, they’d made her drop out of everything.